[Fire] Spec Redesign: V2.0; Looking Towards Patch 6.0

Introduction

Hello all, a few of you may remember my old Fire Spec Redesign that I made several months ago, and has popped back up every now and then. It did garner a decent amount of support, and good ideas have been knocked back and forth. I have also had many people in game, from higher end raiding Mages to average Mages, and they all chimed in with ideas and support as well. With this, the start of Patch 5.4, and the soon-to-be end of the expansion, I have re put everything together and redesigned my...redesign to reflect the changes that have been discussed with me.

The Current Problems of Fire: Why it needs to change

To answer any beginning questions for this guide, I will start with why I believe the spec needs to be redesigned. If you have played a Mage this expansion, you have realized that the class and all of the specs have been very rocky throughout it. Fire in particular, has bounced from a medium spec, to the best spec, to the worst, and slowly climbed its way to a competent spec with gear. Now that doesn't seem so bad in general, however, if you review patch notes you see the true mess of the spec. From 5.0 to 5.2, almost every hotfix had something to do with nerfing Fire, accidentally buffing it with a temporary Combustion change (which was 100% of your ignite, a HUGE unintentional buff). The spec scales well, too well. And that is not a good thing during the MoP era and possibly going into the future.

Back in WotLK, we did not have Inferno Blast. You needed two Fireball crits in order to grab a Hot Streak proc. This reduced the scaling as you were still working against probability in gaining that Pyroblast. Even with up to 60-70% crit back in the day, it is easier nowadays to get a Crit with just 50% crit (and then an Inferno Blast for the free Pyro) than two criticals with 65% crit.

We did have huge amounts of crit in WotLK, however the scaling was not near as huge as it is today.

Now why is scaling a problem? Just look at the hotfixes and patch notes for this expansion. With the addition of x2 Secondary Stat Gems (320 Crit vs 160 INT) and reforging, we can get bucket loads of Crit with Gear than ever before. On top of that, as gear improves through tiers, chances of multiple sockets in gear increases. Those extra sockets are another possible 320 crit, or 160 crit on top of that. This shoots Fire out of control through the patches, requiring constant nerfs. Now nerfs are not a bad thing, but they are when they have gone as uncoordinated as they have this expansion, which makes me afraid for the future. Combustion, our one CD, is completely broken. It is either too good, or too horrible. It is too RNG based, as is the whole spec. And RNG brings in an entire other point.

Crit is the only secondary stat that does this. For specs that rely on it a ton (aka Fire Mages), it can make or break your DPS. Haste? Straight boost to casting speed. Mastery? Straight boost to our ignite. Crit? You either do double damage or you do not. You either get a Heating up proc or you do not. And RNG ruins the fun of specs. Yes, you heroic raiders who had 548 ilevel love RNG, we get that. Because at your gear level, it is almost never a problem, and generally goes in your own favor. However, 95% of the Mage population is or can be screwed over by it, and that is terrible class design. It is horrible to see your DPS drop by 10k of your normal damage one attempt because your RNG is just terrible for that attempt. Oh, you are supposed to have 45% crit buffed? Enjoy quite possibly averaging 34% for an attempt and having terrible Combustion uses on top of that. A class should not be designed around luck. You shouldn't be able to put two equal skilled and equal geared fire mages next to each other and have one pull 20k-30k over the other just because of RNG. No other spec suffers this much, and if it continues, we can expect next expansion to be the same back and forth placing of Fire and the constant complaints from it. And thus, to my proposed changes to fix this.
The New Fire Spec

New Resource:Heat

Heat - Fire Mages will no longer use Mana, we will use "Heat". Heat is a resource that is at a baseline of 0, and climbs to 100, the cap. Spells will generate Heat or cost Heat. Heat will also decay at a rate of 5 heat every 5 seconds*.

*This will occur at a rate of -5 on the 5th second, not -1 for every second (i.e. 50,45,40, not 50,49,48).

New Mastery: Thermophile

Thermophile - As your heat increases, your spell damage is increased by x%, up to a maximum of x% at 100 heat.

Spells that Generate or Cost Heat:

Fireball- Generates 20 Heat.

Scorch - Generates 10 Heat.

Pyroblast - Costs 20 Heat, Now has same cast time as Fireball.

Mage Bomb - Bombs are individually balanced to provide 15 Heat with their explosion or end of duration.

Heating up- When a spell crits, you will gain "Heating up". If the next spell you cast crits, "Heating up" turns into "Hot Streak", which allows a instant cast Pyroblast that does not generate nor cost Heat.

Critical Mass - No longer multplies Crit chance by 1.3
New Passive - Every point 10 points of Heat will increase your critical strike by 3%, up to a maximum of 30% at 100 Heat.

Nether Attunement - Removed as a passiveIgnite - No longer a mastery. Same effect however, but is fixed at x% of your damage instead of scaling off of mastery.

New Cooldowns:
Combustion - No longer makes a DoT based on Ignite Damage.
New CD: Increase your Heat generation by 100% for 15 seconds. 1min 30sec CD.Flame Orb - Reimplemented. Absorbs all Heat your Mage currently has into an orb that fires straight, doing x% damage based on your Heat for the next 10 seconds. If cast at multiple targets, damage is split between them. Orb explodes at end of duration. 1min CD.

NEW ADDITION - Wildfire - Your Critical Strike Damage is increased by 50% for the next 15 seconds. 2min CD.

Glyph of the Phoenix - Minor Glyph. Your Flame Orb spell is no longer an orb, but takes the shape of a Phoenix that flies out in front of you, shooting fire at any target(s) near it. Explodes into ash at the end of the duration. (Cosmetic).

NEW: Possibly having Heat as a main "fire bar" but also adding a Mana bar to use spells outside of the Fire line of spells (for things like Ice Barrier, Spellsteal, etc).

Now with the basics over, there is still a lot to review and think over. There are still spells in the repertoire I didn't include (i.e. Spellsteal or Ice Barrier). My possible changes for things such as these (that I will allow you guys to assume a blanket example here for the rest of the spells not included):

Spellsteal - Costs 0 Heat, now a 10 second CD.

Ice Barrier - Costs 0 Heat, 25 second CD.

However, with spells like Invocation and the such, things that have to do with our mana specifically (as mana gem has been addressed), I would just leave the mana part out like such:

Invocation - A full cast of Evocation now increases spell damage by 15% for 60 seconds.

This also assumes 90 talents will not change next expansion (kill ourselves).

Now at the nature of the spec. It will be based on maintaining high amounts of heat, and your DPS will be better the higher average you can keep it at (sort of like Arcane's Mana Adept). With Critical Mass giving us a built in possible 30% crit, I would assume the strongest stat would be Haste for us, if not Intellect. Since our Mastery no longer includes the DPS of a major CD, I find it to be weaker than it currently is. My guesstimated Stat priority would be:

Hit/Exp (to 15%) > Haste > Intellect > Crit = Mastery

However, I am not running a sim here, I am guessing. I could be completely wrong, and it also depends on how well the Mastery would be initially implemented. Now, why is Crit lower if we still have Hot Streak? Because I believe for this Spec redesign to work, we would need to nerf the damage of Fireball by 10%-20% and Pyroblast by 20-30%, otherwise Pyroblasts would be too easy to come by and hit way to hard to really be fair. With Pyroblast now the same base cast time as Fireball, it becomes our main Heat user when we cannot get free casts, and it will overall be used more than it is today.

*To be added to when necessary*

Final Notes:

Now, the ending notes to this. This spec is complete theory. I have no idea how great it would preform, I have no idea how easy it would be to implement. I just know that many people liked the original idea, and I have brought all of our ideas together to make this. It is the end of an expansion (or the beginning of the end), and I would LOVE Fire to change for the future, and I believe this spec design to be the step in the right direction. Will Blizzard ever see this? Probably not. However, we can at least try. If you do like this spec, or have a question, feel free to comment or ask. The more people that see this, the higher chance that Blizzard will see this if it gets a lot of Mage support (which is good if you like the idea, right?). Get other Mages to read it, link it to your friends, spread it around!

If you hate the spec and think I am a dumby, please comment as well. Offer your critique, offer your suggestions, offer what you think about it in any way, shape, or form. I did this all in one night, I might have missed a key point, or wrote something that sounds weird or stupid that I could reword better. So point any mistakes out too.

Thank you for reading this, if you want to get in touch with me in game, my battletag is Rhaegas#1141.

If I remember right Fire had scaling problems in WotLK, but mostly cause it didn't get any +hit from talents and our crit went too damn high in ICC heroic gear.

There are 2 things though that would be soo bad.. those being:

Critical Mass - No longer multplies Crit chance by 1.3
New Passive - Every point 10 points of Heat will increase your critical strike by 3%, up to a maximum of 30% at 100 Heat.

Thermophile - As your heat increases, your spell damage is increased by x%, up to a maximum of x% at 100 heat.

These 2 things would make us pool heat at 100 all the freaking time, I mean sure it prolly makes us cast Pyro each time we hit 90-100, but that doesn't sound too fun to me, maybe am just overly critical now, but just feels like meh.

Plus what would we do as long term AoE? With these changes we can only do 2 Meteors, fireball, 1 meteor, 2 fireballs, meteor, 2 fireballs, meteor etc.. Doesn't sound too much fun either.

Well I'd make pyroblast instant cast even without proc. So one could store some heat for movement phase and do pyros instead of scorches if burst is needed then. Think it wouldn't still be as good in pvp as frost is. Also I'd love for invocation talent being passive bonus 15% dmg, or just completely reworking the 90 talents. (casting evocation gets old)

If I remember right Fire had scaling problems in WotLK, but mostly cause it didn't get any +hit from talents and our crit went too damn high in ICC heroic gear.

There are 2 things though that would be soo bad.. those being:

These 2 things would make us pool heat at 100 all the freaking time, I mean sure it prolly makes us cast Pyro each time we hit 90-100, but that doesn't sound too fun to me, maybe am just overly critical now, but just feels like meh.

Plus what would we do as long term AoE? With these changes we can only do 2 Meteors, fireball, 1 meteor, 2 fireballs, meteor, 2 fireballs, meteor etc.. Doesn't sound too much fun either.

As a resource, DPS will just have to work by its 50+ heat or higher uptime. It can't be just Energy or Demonic Fury, it would be better for the class to be unique in my own opinion. If you have an idea to make it better, throw it at me. We could make the decay higher, like 10p5 or so, to make it more difficult. My last redesign had several abilities that used all the heat, and I think Heat generation was slightly harder in V1.0. I will brainstorm if it gets more complaints.

Current AoE is lackluster as well. I just stand in things and Arcane Explosion for the most part. You can bomb spread and all I suppose, or combustion spread. Flamestrike is lackluster in general. I was more thinking Meteors/Fireballs and Bomb spreading with Inferno Blast, plus you have Flame Orb as well. Maybe make Blast Wave more AoE oriented? However, the issue with that is people liked Blast Wave the way it is. Dragon's Breath could be stronger as AoE too.

EDIT: And yeah in WotLK better geared Mages were still Fire due to its scaling, however you could still do Fire at lower ilevels and it wouldn't be as lackluster as it is in MoP, because general crit was higher with T9 2P bonus plus how Molten Armor worked.

Originally Posted by gaunt

Well I'd make pyroblast instant cast even without proc. So one could store some heat for movement phase and do pyros instead of scorches if burst is needed then. Think it wouldn't still be as good in pvp as frost is. Also I'd love for invocation talent being passive bonus 15% dmg, or just completely reworking the 90 talents. (casting evocation gets old)

I am mainly focusing on the PvE Aspect than PvP, not because I don't like PvP, I just am not skillful enough at it to give an honest breakdown for things to work and be balanced. I did take PvP into consideration, but only for the spec and not for theorycrafting. I don't want Pyro to be an instant cast w/o HS proc'd because than the damage would have to be nerfed further because it would just be too insane. I like our movement the way it is now with Scorch + Hot Streak procs. Plus Presence of Mind I suppose (however that is usually used for Combustion).

We have no idea if the 90 talents will be here next expansion or not, for now I am just using the basis that they will be for these purposes.

Just giving some basic feedback. I like mana. Mana makes me feel like a mage, a magician, a wizard, a spellcaster. It's archetypal - I want the archetype. I use mana to call forth my magic.

Heat sounds far too similar to rage or runic power. Or another "energy" type deal ala monks, destro locks, feral druids, rogues. Those classes all have their charms. But I'm a mage, and I don't want to feel anything like the rest of them. I wouldn't even mind a return to mana meaning something in terms of your ability to cast spells (as opposed to the effectiveness of those spells), where one bad evocation screws your dps.

The similarity to rage is what really kills me. Rage sucks. It really sucks. Warriors have been complaining about it for years, and it's still terrible and awful. Straight energy is way better.

Because of this, I don't like the mastery either. And just as well - that kind of mastery has screwed with arcane for far too long, and I find it too untenable.

I do like the spell ideas contained underneath them. I just prefer that they be incorporated into a slow burning mana resource, instead of a build up/breakdown of 100 power.

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by LocNess

I am mainly focusing on the PvE Aspect than PvP,

Regarding PvP, the main issue is that this type of a system completely messes up mana drain type strategies, especially if both arcane and frost are staying with mana. You'd have to redesign the resource system for both specs to balance fire from a PvP standpoint. Also remember all dps-only specs share spells across specs specs, for example serpent sting, rupture, and i can't remember which but i think demo and afflic share a dot in there somewhere. Corruption I think. Basically you can't change fire like this without arcane/frost

Removing mana from a mage/wizard in a frp is not acceptable. WoW is a MMORPG as well as it is a frp based storyline. Removing mana is like removing long beards from dwarves or tusks from trolls or axes from warriors. It ıs against its culture, its traditions.

And then it's dysfunction this, and dysfunction that, and dysfunction vaffancul!

How exactly are you dealing with the crit scaling going from UP to balanced to OP in every ilvl region in the game?

If it cost 0 heat, then how long will it CC with 0 heat? Don't you think 10 seconds of CC is OP? Yes it is. Make it less silly.

No, just no. It was buggy and they never managed to fix it.

Don't really understand your first point on crit scaling too much, but I am extremely tired so might just be misreading it.

Dragon's Breath CC breaks on Damage, no different than using Blind on a target.

If they can make Frozen Orb work, they can make Flame orb work. I used it plenty in Cata and don't remember having issues with it.

To the two people above, Mana is pointless to us. We literally never have mana issues, who really cares if it is removed? Because it is some "staple"? Unless your mana is being used and constantly on your mind (which it is not), it should not matter what happens to it.

Some thoughts of mine based on these ideas being advanced. I agree that the schizophrenic "balancing" of Fire needs to be fixed, but I'm not sure that overhauling the entire spec from ground up is the way to go. The heat mechanic doesn't feel like a traditional mana bar so much as another set of combo points or rage, and while there is some merit to having Fire Mages be hot-tempered pyromaniac lunatics, it would be a massive change from the other two specs (not to mention all the other spellcasters).

To start with, Heating Up needs to be restricted to Fire spells (oversight, maybe?). Otherwise, once we hit 100 Heat, there is NO incentive whatsoever to cast Fireball when Frostbolt is 1. faster to cast, 2. deals more damage, 3. benefits from Thermophile, and 4. can proc Heating Up. 30% extra crit for simply casting a bunch of Fireballs is just too good to pass up, and given that Thermophile also increases your raw damage depending on heat, together it feels like Heat is just a Fire-themed Arcane Charge.

Not sure why Flamestrike had to be replaced by Meteor seeing as how Meteor ... seems to do almost the exact same thing as the previous Flamestrike.

Stat priorities will depend heavily on just how much of a damage increase Thermophile provides, but it probably boils down to

Intellect > Hit to cap > Haste/Mastery > Crit

where Crit is easily our least contributing stat simply because we get a free 35% baseline (30% from Heat, 5% from Arcane Brilliance).

Really, this entire design seems to hinge around the Heat mechanic and Thermophile and I feel that it would play too much like "Arcane, but with red spells". I understand that Pyroblast's cast time is being shortened to act as a "Heat dump" mechanic but given that Heat increases both your raw damage (mastery) and your crit it seems that it would be a DPS loss to dump out your Heat - especially if Pyro's damage is being nerfed by 20-30%. At that point, fishing for procs using Frostbolt or Arcane Blast is simply a better use of accumulated Heat than venting it off with Pyroblast.

Some thoughts of mine based on these ideas being advanced. I agree that the schizophrenic "balancing" of Fire needs to be fixed, but I'm not sure that overhauling the entire spec from ground up is the way to go. The heat mechanic doesn't feel like a traditional mana bar so much as another set of combo points or rage, and while there is some merit to having Fire Mages be hot-tempered pyromaniac lunatics, it would be a massive change from the other two specs (not to mention all the other spellcasters).

To start with, Heating Up needs to be restricted to Fire spells (oversight, maybe?). Otherwise, once we hit 100 Heat, there is NO incentive whatsoever to cast Fireball when Frostbolt is 1. faster to cast, 2. deals more damage, 3. benefits from Thermophile, and 4. can proc Heating Up. 30% extra crit for simply casting a bunch of Fireballs is just too good to pass up, and given that Thermophile also increases your raw damage depending on heat, together it feels like Heat is just a Fire-themed Arcane Charge.

Not sure why Flamestrike had to be replaced by Meteor seeing as how Meteor ... seems to do almost the exact same thing as the previous Flamestrike.

Stat priorities will depend heavily on just how much of a damage increase Thermophile provides, but it probably boils down to

Intellect > Hit to cap > Haste/Mastery > Crit

where Crit is easily our least contributing stat simply because we get a free 35% baseline (30% from Heat, 5% from Arcane Brilliance).

Really, this entire design seems to hinge around the Heat mechanic and Thermophile and I feel that it would play too much like "Arcane, but with red spells". I understand that Pyroblast's cast time is being shortened to act as a "Heat dump" mechanic but given that Heat increases both your raw damage (mastery) and your crit it seems that it would be a DPS loss to dump out your Heat - especially if Pyro's damage is being nerfed by 20-30%. At that point, fishing for procs using Frostbolt or Arcane Blast is simply a better use of accumulated Heat than venting it off with Pyroblast.

tl;dr - as is, the spec feels like 5.1 Arcane.

If you cut any spec down to its core, it can easily sound like another spec. Arcane also works around keeping your Mana high for DPS, but Mana also regens, and the spec is defined by your returns with Rune of Power. Also it works by increasing the mana cost for damage of its abilities, until you dump it and start again. I can see the similarities, but I don't think it is near enough to be called "lolnewarcanespec".

Also, IIRC Firemages don't have frostbolt to cast. We have Frostfire Bolt, but that is about it. I didn't want to get into every single Mage Spell that Fire can use to filter through all of them, because it isn't important at the moment.

Meteor is close to the same as Flamestrike. I would like an initial Strong hit followed by the Dot (kind of a mix between Chaos Wave and Hand of Guldan). Flamestrike as it is right now is extremely lack luster.

If I remember right Fire had scaling problems in WotLK, but mostly cause it didn't get any +hit from talents and our crit went too damn high in ICC heroic gear.

There are 2 things though that would be soo bad.. those being:

These 2 things would make us pool heat at 100 all the freaking time, I mean sure it prolly makes us cast Pyro each time we hit 90-100, but that doesn't sound too fun to me, maybe am just overly critical now, but just feels like meh.

Plus what would we do as long term AoE? With these changes we can only do 2 Meteors, fireball, 1 meteor, 2 fireballs, meteor, 2 fireballs, meteor etc.. Doesn't sound too much fun either.

This would be just like the old arcane playstlye/mastery. The only difference would be we wouldn't be spamming 1 spell until the keyboard broke.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before... He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way. -Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"

This is pretty well thought out, and I really like it. You've managed to emphasise the concepts of fire and implement them into great mechanics.
The only thing that I would question is the absolute removal of mana, but the only drainer of mana nowadays is Spell Steal, which you have addressed.

Here's the thing, none of our specs need an actual overhaul of this nature. Passive and mechanical changes, sure, but not something on the level that Warlocks got. Also, you can't simply say you're looking at PvE and ignoring PvP...Blizzard won't, which makes all your points moot from the get go.